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Storage industry upstart Whiptail, which makes high-performance NAND flash enterprise arrays for midrange and larger customers, on Nov. 29 announced a major upgrade to its flagship Invicta system.
The company is using its own “hyperscale scale-up/scale-out” Infinity architecture to scale out its six-node 72-terabyte Invicta array to as many as 30 nodes and up to 360TB of all-flash storage. That’s a lot of solid-state capacity for any size enterprise storage system.
However, NAND flash production is up and prices generally are down, which leads to these kinds of improvements in the fast-processing storage business.
Using the Infinity option, enterprises can scale performance and capacity as needed, CEO Dan Crain said. In early testing, a 180TB, 15-node Invicta Infinity array produced performance numbers of 2.1 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 21.8GB/second throughput, he said.
4 Million IOPs, 40GB/s Speeds
“We expect a fully populated 30-node, 360TB Infinity to exceed 4 million IOPS and 40GB/s throughput in real-world use,” said Whiptail CTO James Candelaria. “We’re breaking down the data silos, but more importantly, we’re allowing the enterprise to think about flash strategically rather than tactically. You no longer have to worry about hot and cold data when you can have everything available on Whiptail.”
Four-year-old Whiptail, based in Whippany, N.J., claims that this new option will make Invicta Infinity the “highest-capacity, highest-performing and most flexible enterprise-class modular solid-state storage array on the market.”
That may or may not be exactly true, but the new system does warrant adding the company to a list that includes more well-known NAND flash storage names as EMC’s XtremIO, Oracle Exadata, SolidFire, Violin Memory, Fusion-io, Tintri and Kaminario.
‘Like Eating Potato Chips’
“One clear theme that we’ve heard from our customers is, ‘We want more, ‘” Crain said. “What they are discovering is once they start moving their data and applications to Whiptail, their productivity increases so much that they want to bring all of their business-critical apps to flash.
“It’s like eating potato chips; you can’t stop with just one.”
Whiptail, which sells into the e-commerce, financial services, government, legal, health care, education, and Internet services markets, counts among its strategic partners VMware, Cisco Systems and Citrix. The new arrays become available in the first quarter of 2013, Crain said.